Researching this article, I got to delve into the slightly bonkers but bleeding-edge world of RNA interference, known in science circles as RNAi. Despite the discoverers of RNAi – one of whom is called Professor Fire (!) – winning a Nobel Prize in 2006 I’d never heard of it before. I think I was in a pub at the time.

The biological process amazes me (which is why I haven’t just said ‘read my article, please’ and left it at that). It’s a whirling dervish of tiny strings of genetic words and proteins with names like dicer, argonaute and peewee (OK, actually PIWI). But what is it?

By stopping proteins from popping out, RNAi also stops your genome from reshuffling and protects against viruses and other ‘foreign genetic material’. Once, I took a genetics module. Our lecturer was fond of telling us that when you touch another DNA-containing organism – like when you shake hands or something more intimate – strands of their DNA can get into your cells. This, I guess, is how your body stops your mate’s genes from causing problems inside you. (I thought about tempering the euphemism, but where’s the fun in that?)

All this means your genome contains ways to protect itself. To me, that’s amazing. Now biotech firms are pursuing ways of harnessing RNAi to treat some causes of blindness, Huntington’s disease, amyloidosis (which I talk about in the main article), viral infections and perhaps even cancer.

If you’re interested in learning more, the scientific powerhouse Nature produced a slideshow and animation, showing how RNAi works. (It’s quite jargony but, on the plus side, makes the whole process look like a sort of cute dystopian future in which we’re all slaves to giant globular overlords.)